Wednesday, 30 March 2016

I've described my technique for making styrene roofs before but some of you may appreciate seeing it again.

Generally speaking unless you have a piece of moulded plastic any roof made out of flat sheet forced into a curve is highly likely to sag in the middle where it is unsupported.

The solution we hit on is to start with a flat roof and add shaped ribs which support it along its length.

You can also see in the picture that I have prepared the roof skin - a piece of 15" sheet - which has triangular cut outs where the domed ends will be shaped with the help of Milliput.

What I will do when I come to fit it is attach one side with a very generous dose of solvent and wait for it to set firmly before turning it upside down and rocking it over and bonding the opposite edge, holding it down with very firm pressure for a few minutes until the skin stays stretched in position.

Saturday, 26 March 2016

With the carriage body sides joined together and a floor keeping the lower half in shape the obvious thing to so next is make something to so the same job at the top.

The way I build our carriages is generally to have a fixed roof and a removable floor, and within that is a false ceiling to give support to the fragile top of of the body.

What you see here is a three layer laminate.

The bottom layer is a neat fit inside the top of the body. The middle one sits on top and at this stage is slightly over-sized.

Both of these are necessary parts of the structure of my roofs but the top layer is an additional one I've added this time to give it more rigidity and prevent it flexing when the roof skin is stretched over the top later on.

Tuesday, 22 March 2016

Himself appears to be serious about making a new fiddle yard / continuous run for Dduallt because he's invested in some wood.

There's none of your fancy-pants lightweight plywood construction around here - our base boards are virtually bomb-proof and built up on a solid foundation of best 2 x 1.

The nature of the challenge can be see in this photo of the back of the layout.

Until now the layout has operated with two independent yards with the upper one 7cm higher than the lower (Porthmadog) end and the whole assembly resembled a giant U shape.

What we're thinking at the moment is that we'll have a handful of loops which feed into the single track at either end.

According to my very basic calculations - and there's every chance these could be completely wrong - the gradient is 1 in 35 (7 cm gain in 250cm) which could prove interesting for Down trains which will have to climb back up the ramp again to get to the Blaenau end of the spiral!

Sunday, 20 March 2016

It won't be long before the bits of the Disco Carriage can be glued together into a body shell.

I took my time forming the doors at each end of the sides.

I used a template to try to ensure that the gap between the last window post and the main pillars at the corner was precisely the same distance because it is all to easy to end up with sides that are different lengths, leading to a rather squinty body.

The other thing to be really careful about is to ensure those pillars at the end are completely upright and not leaning in or out.

It is unmistakably a 'Tin Car' now.

Just before I glue it together I'll need to remind myself what height to set the floor at and fix some blocks on the back to achieve that.

Wednesday, 16 March 2016

Himself celebrated the start of his eighth decade this week and part of the celebrations included a ceremonial erection of Dduallt in its new home.

Around three weeks after moving in the railway room (nee garage) is sufficiently clear to enable him to use it for the purpose that he moved to the other end of the country for - somewhere to have space to work on projects and play trains at the same time!

At the moment it is just the scenic boards bolted together and mounted on trestles because we haven't decided on the best spot in the room for it.

Himself is also giving consideration to the possibilities of building a new single fiddle yard that runs along the back of the layout - as opposed to the two sitting at 90 degrees which we have at the moment - which would enable us to turn it into a continuous run, albeit with a rather fearsome ski slope connection between the two levels.

Thursday, 10 March 2016

We've taken another small step towards getting Himself back in business and transforming his double garage into a deluxe railway cave.

The other day with a team effort we managed to get his old workbench up on the wall.

(This is always an entertaining exercise when the wall in question is constructed of plasterboard sheet and you play many happy rounds of hunt the battens)

This folding board must be getting on for 35 years old now.

Originally it was mounted on my bedrooom wall to be a home for a Scalextric set.

Then it was commandeered as a handy surface to construct our first exhibition layout - a OO effort called Wickford - on.

When we moved house in the late 80's it was taken to the new place and reduced in size by about a third and put up in the garage where we used it to build both Dduallt and Bron Hebog.

It still comes in very handy when working on individual baseboards because it's much sturdier than mounting them on trestles, and of course you can easily rest the boards on their sides to get at their undersides.

Tuesday, 8 March 2016

I had intended to put the ribbing on the sides of the carriage next but then I discovered a small stock-taking oversight.

Neither I nor Himself - who foolishly entrusted his stock of styrene strip to me during his house move - have any of the correct size strip for the job.

So while I wait for new supplies to arrive I'll have to find something else to get on with, so I've started work on the two ends.

The Tin Cars are market out by the windows in the ends which were put in to with a view towards the carriages eventually being used in push pull service - which this one was - so the driver could look back down the train.

The are also unusual in having a flat profile along the top due to the domes at each end of the roof so the basic structure is relatively simple to make.

Once the joints have set firmly I can curl the rim around the outer windows just like I did on the sides.

Friday, 4 March 2016

I've been using one of my favourite modelling materials to fill in the gaps in the corners of the windows on 121.

Milliput - the two part epoxy putty produced by a family firm in Gwynedd - is ideal because it is firm enough that you can push it into small spaces without it squirting out the other side as some of the stuff you get from a tube would.

At the same time you can add a droplet of water to it and make it run into tiny gaps and afterwards wipe away any excess.

Whilst it does take 24 hours to set the benefit is it remains workable for a long time so it doesn't develop a fragile skin within a few minutes of contact with air, and it also dries to a perfectly smooth finish which can be sanded, drilled or filed.

Later on it the project it will be my material of choice for forming the domed ends on the roof.

Sometimes I wonder how I would ever manage without having some of it in my modelling box.

Wednesday, 2 March 2016

So this is how I begin turning that basic bodyshell that I showed you in the last post into something that looks a lot more like a Tin Car.

To my mind there are at least three very distinctive features of these carriages: the domed ends to the roofs; the ribs on the bodysides; and the rounded window frames.

When I first made these carriages I reproduced the corners by gluing in small triangles and filing them down with a round file.

These days I'm a little more ambitious and if I can I like to try and represent the metal rim of the windows.

To do that I take a very thin piece of strip - just 10 thou thick - and a tiny bit wider than the bodyshell, so 30 thou against 20 thou for the first layer of the bodyshell.

What I do then is to curl it around inside the square hole, a bit at a time, letting it form a chord across the corners and then very carefully chopping the ends so them meet precisely along the bottom edge.

Next, I will fill the small gaps in the corners with Milliput and then add the horizontal rail and a small vertical piece in the middle of each of the large windows to represent the sliding ventilation panes.

Because I have used 30 thou strip they are just a tiny bit proud and, I hope, will look quite effective.

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About Me

Broadcaster, writer and railway modeller.
Best known for the 009 Festiniog Railway layout 'Dduallt' which I built with my father David in the early 1990's and which is still making appearances on the exhibition circuit.